Interview: ALLEGIANCE's 'Honorary Asian' Marc Acito Reveals How His Mid-Life Crisis Brought Him to Broadway

Marc Acito has a lot to look forward to this fall. in just weeks, is words will come to life onstage when Allegiance begins previews at the Longacre Theatre (220 West 48th Street). The musical, inspired by George Takei's true-life story, marks Acito's Broadway debut- a feat that he didn't even consider possible just six years ago.

ALLEGIANCE follows one family's extraordinary journey in this untold American story. A mysterious envelope leads Sam Kimura (Takei) back 60 years to a time when he (played as a young man by Telly Leung -- Godspell, "Glee") and his sister Kei (Tony winner Lea Salonga -- Miss Saigon, Mulan) strive to save their family from the wrongful imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Sam enlists in the army to prove the Kimura's loyalty, but Kei joins draft resisters fighting for the rights of their people. Their paths take them from the lush farmlands of California to the wastelands of Wyoming to the battlefields of Europe, and their divided loyalties threaten to tear them apart forever. But as long-lost memories are unlocked, Sam finds that it is never too late to forgive and to recognize the redemptive power of love.

Just last week, Marc checked in with BroadwayWorld to update us on how things have been going in the rehearsal room. Check out the full interview below!

How are rehearsals going so far?

Fantastic. You caught me on a day where I am doing a lot of re-writes. The book writer's job in the rehearsal studio is a peculiar one because part of my job is being like a firefighter. I often sit around doing nothing for long periods of time. You know, there have been days where I have changed an average of one line per hour over the course of a day. Then (sometimes like a firefighter) you have to leap in action and put out a fire. Suddenly we realize that something doesn't work and we need to change it, and then you know it's all hands on deck and let's get this done! On a gig like this though, you know, that means I get to sit around and listen to Lea Salonga you know, sing all day.

This is true. These are the perks of the job!

You know, exactly. Totally. That is one of the major benefits of the show. Absolutely one of the most glorious things about this gig is sharing molecules with her.

I know that this show has been many years in the making. Can you take me back a little bit to tell me how you first became involved with the project?

Absolutely. The project originated with the composer Jay Kuo, who is an Asian-American composer from San Francisco, and his producing partner, Lorenzo Thione, who is the lead producer on the project. They had a chance encounter with George Takei seven years ago. They found themselves seated behind him at Forbidden Broadway on a trip to New York and got into a conversation and then the following night, found themselves seated just a few seats away from him at In the Heights. At the intermission (at In the Heights), George was inconsolable. I mean, tears, pouring down his face. So, they couldn't help but ask him, you know, what had moved him so much? And there is a song in In the Heights called, 'Inútil,' which the father sings about feeling ineffective. George then proceeded to tell Jay and Lorenzo this heartbreaking story about a fight he had had with his father about the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, because George's family was interned and George was interned as a child and it caused some really hard feelings within his family... difficult unspoken things that they never resolved. So, as Jay and Lorenzo were listening to this story they both had the same thought, "There's a musical in this." So, Jay went home and wrote the song "Allegiance" and sent it to George and said, "You inspired us to create this story." And George said, "What do you want? How can I help?"

Wow, it was fate!

Yes! So, fast-forward they started working on the script without a playwright. They just started putting ideas together. So there was a partial script and a few songs and they said, "We need to get a leading lady to come in and do a reading with us so we can find out what we have." They said, "Well, let's try to get Lea Salonga," who, as it turns out, is an enormous Star Trek nerd! So when she found out that George Takei wanted to meet her she said, "Great! I'll come to Los Angeles to meet George Takei." So, there has been a lot of serendipity with this project and a real raw, emotional power. Basically what happened was the sheer power of this story was so moving to so many people that in very quick succession they found themselves with two major stars, Stafford Arima as the director and a production already scheduled at the Old Globe. What they didn't have was a finished script. So they were scrambling at this point to get a playwright on board to help realize the vision.

So that is where you came in?

Yes, just shortly before the Old Globe. I mean like I said, it was incredible though. They already had readings and auditions and people were weeping in the aisle. There was so much visceral, raw feelings about this. There was clearly something there, but it just wasn't fully realized yet. So, I came into the midst of their situation and what had happened was, I had my adaptation of A Room with a View had been done at the Old Globe that same season. So, they came to see my show and offered me the role in the San Diego Zoo as a matter of fact. I did my interview in front of the pandas at the San Diego Zoo. [Laughs]

You know, I can't say this enough, and I'm afraid it's going to sound corny, but it's such an immense honor to be asked to participate in this project. As a white writer, to be able to tell this story of American history from the Japanese-American perspective is not something I ever would've done on my own. You know, I wouldn't have presumed, but to have this incredible Asian-American team between the composer, the director, George, who was our guiding light, and then all of the other people working on the show. I felt like I had an environment where I could safely participate in helping to tell this story. The cast has made me what they call "An honorary Asian." So, my name is Marc Acito, as you know, but what they actually call me is "Marcus Ito" and I am the honorary Asian playwright.

That's genius!

I come to the theater as a mid-life change. You know, I was a novelist and a journalist. So, writing for the theater was my middle-life crisis, which was precipitated by the death of my mother, which was 6 years ago. It was one of those 'Well, if not now, when? experiences. So, I sold my house in Portland, OR, where I was living as a novelist and a journalist, I moved back to New York because I'm from here originally, and decided that within five years, I would get to Broadway. Almost to the day, I'm managing to get to Broadway within five years, which is an astonishing blessing. What is particularly meaningful to me, personally, is that our opening night would've been my mother's 76th Birthday. So when I found out, because of course I didn't engineer that, that was just something that happened.

So as someone who came into the project a little bit later, what were your beginning steps to get the ball rolling?

Let's just put it this way- I came on and five actors lost their jobs. I killed off five characters, because I came in and looked at it with fresh eyes and said "I think we need to focus the heat of the story in a different place." And so unfortunately some characters had to go. So the first thing I said was Marc Acito, the honorary Asian playwright, was also the killer of dreams, and a number of characters bit the dust and went away.

I have a real passion, a very geeky, nerdy passion for story structure. I like to take stories apart the way other people like to take apart clocks and toasters. I've coached literally hundreds of writers in this discipline. You know primarily as a novelist but really writers of all mediums. So to come in and work with somebody else's story to help them find their story and find a way in which I could overlap with it is familiar to me. I've done this; having to work with so many writers before being collaborative was really natural to me. So it was a matter of finding a story that everybody wanted to tell. And make sure that everybody's contribution was heard. And that's pretty much our culture here. It is a really, exhaustively, collaborative experience... and I put the emphasis on exhaustion.

I also read you're kind of doing double duty right now, right? You have Chasing Rainbows happening soon?

So excited about this project. It's another true story, inspired by a true story. I find myself increasingly drawn to true stories and stories that have an authentic hope in an unexpected place. Judy Garland, because of the way her life ended, you would expect that it's a very tragic story. But Lorna Luft, Judy Garland's daughter, said: 'Tragic things happened to my mother, but she wasn't a tragedy." There was a life-force spirit there that actually is a part of that story that hardly ever gets told.

So the focus of the story is on Judy Garland's adolescence and the loss of the love of her life, which was her father. And the family that she created on her road to becoming Dorothy, and there's a surprisingly powerfully uplifting story in there. We'll open in Flat Rock, and then, shortly, we'll be announcing the second production, which I can't tell you where it is yet, but there's already a second production in a major theater at the ready.

Okay, so we're about two months out from opening night right now. What're you looking the most forward to with getting to opening night?

Yeah, you know...we're at New 42nd right now rehearsing. This is technically my New York debut as well as my Broadway debut. It's just an unusual occurrence. I did the adaptation of Paint Your Wagon last season at City Center Encores!, but that's really just...you have a concert adaptation of a piece. But I have rehearsed workshops here, you know to do regional gigs and that kind of thing before. So, in some ways it doesn't...it still doesn't quite feel real.

It still feels like we could be going out of town. So the thing that I'm most looking forward to is getting into the theater because there's just nothing like it. There's nothing like a Broadway theater. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. It is the pinnacle; it is the finish line. And to actually experience that, and I haven't gotten to that yet; I haven't had the chance to experience that. And I get little moments of...you know our poster went up in Shubert Alley, and that was one big turning point.

I think that's always a big thing for poeple. How exciting that must have been for you...

And not just for me. This is a group project. Not just Allegiance, but my whole career is group project in that my husband, Floyd Sklaver, and I will celebrate our 29th anniversary during Allegiance. Our first date was in New York City in 1986 at the Halloween Parade. We both came to New York at that point; he was in graduate school, I was an undergrad. It was the worst season on Broadway in recorded history. Broadway was dying. We were broken, and young, and scared. We met each other like two people grabbing onto a life raft. We grabbed onto each other and we fled. We went to Portland, Oregon and had an adventure. And we came back to New York with a sense that we're grown ups and there's some unfinished business. It's truly a love story.

Acito makes his Broadway debut with Allegiance. Mr. Acito's comedy Birds of a Feather won the Helen Hayes Award for Best New Play and has been produced by theaters around the country. His novel How I Paid for College won the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction and was a New York Times Editors' Choice; his one-man musical adaptation of that novel debuted at the Hub Theatre and has been optioned by a commercial producer. Other projects in development include Chasing Rainbows, a musical about the adolescence of Judy Garland; and Relativity, a new play about the relationship between Albert Einstein and Marian Anderson. For several years, 12 million listeners heard Mr. Acito's commentaries on NPR's All Things Considered. Now a regular contributor to Playbill, he teaches Story Structure to writers at NYU.

Photo Credit: Henry DiRocco